From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The motif of a hero’s miraculous birth is quite
common in world folklore,
and especially fairy-tales. Additionally, it can be found in many
religions – from the most basic beliefs to modern religions like Christianity and Buddhism.

The kinds of miraculous birth are categorized into the following
groups:

Contents

Virgin
Birth

Birth from a virginal woman. This does not inherently require a
'miraculous' explanation - parthenogenesis can be explained
scientifically, although it has never been observed in humans.
There have been several cases throughout history of claims for a
miraculous 'virgin birth':

According to certain Buddhist legend, Gautama Buddha's mother Maya gave birth to him without
sexual activity being involved in his conception; Saint Jerome reports this as a virgin
birth.

Conception from a fruit

This theme is seen quite often in Russian and Ukrainian fairy
tales in the form of eating a pea,
while in the rest of the world, the most popular fruits for such
beliefs are apples and nuts. It is considered
that conception by eating (or, in some cases, merely touching) the
fruit is an attempt to transfer the seemingly amazing fertility of
the plants to humans. Then, some suggest that the seeds in a fruit
(and especially a nut) may be seen as a symbol of a baby inside the
womb.

Birth by an incantation or
a spell

An especially bright example of such a birth is the beginning of
the Snow White
fairytale. When the blood from the Queen’s pricked finger falls on
the snow, she makes a wish to have a daughter with snow-white skin
and blood-red lips. However, the queen’s words may as well be
considered a sort of a magic incantation. It’s quite possible that in
the earlier versions of the tale, the wording of the wish (or
spell) was not “I wish I had a child…”, but “Let me have a child…”
However, conception by a spell is comparatively rare, because it is
usually combined with a touch, a hit, or a look.

Birth by
drinking water

This motif has its roots in the belief in the power of water to
bring life. In a Northern Russian fairytale, a queen drinks water
from a spring and thereby conceives a son, whom she calls Ivan
Vodovich (the similar in English would be something like Waterson).
There was also a strong belief in the conceiving power of the rain,
which was especially strong among agricultural tribes.

These beliefs in a way form a single group, because all of the
forces that apparently cause miraculous pregnancy have a natural
origin. In this way, the ancient humans attempted to transfer the
power of the nature to reproduce itself onto themselves. However,
some of these beliefs are not purely naturalistic. Some of them may
be combined with animalistic concepts.

Birth as the return of the
dead

This is most likely related to a belief that a born person used
to live before, or, shortly, reincarnation. Therefore, in folklore we
can see the return of a hero, an ancestor, etc., through rebirth. The origin of this
belief is seen by some in the resemblance of the children and
parents, and the ignorance of the supposed origin of the new human
souls. Reincarnation might have been the easiest way to explain
where souls go after death and where they come from at the birth.
The motive of a hero’s fast growth may also be related to this
category, implying that the child used to live before as an adult,
but since a woman is physically incapable of giving birth to an
adult, the hero has to undergo a short phase of growth and
development. Such heroes are present in Egyptian, Greek, and
African myths, where the heroes are usually born in the times of
trouble, and right after maturing they start undertaking heroic
deeds.

Signals

There are also normal births that are marked by wonders, like astrological events,
earthquakes or healings.

List

Huitzilopochtli: The Aztec god
of war and the sun, he was conceived when a ball of feathers fell
on his mother Coatlicue
while she was cleaning a temple. The ball of feathers was actually
Mixcoatl, the god of the
hunt.

Hunahpu and Xbalanque: The
Mayan Hero
Twins, in their holy book the Popol Vuh, were conceived after twin
sons of the Creators were summoned by the lords of Xibalba and beheaded for
playing a noisy ball game. The head of one twin, Huh Hunahpu,
magically impregnated Ixquic (also known as Blood Moon).

Laozi:
Laozi, or LaoTzu, lived in the 6th century BC and authored the Tao
Te Ching, according to Chinese tradition. " In legends, he was
conceived when his mother gazed upon a falling star" [1]

Augustus: His mother Atia fell asleep
in the temple of Apollo and a snake glided up to her and she became
pregnant by Apollo (Suetonius - De Vita Caesarum).